When someone sees your website for the first time, chances are they will end up on your main home page. But how do you build a good home page, meaning one that will be able to convert website visitors into profitable customers for your business? There are certain elements that will definitely have an influence on your conversion rates. By implementing these tips on your own website, you will see that they result in better customer satisfaction with your site and ultimately will lead to higher conversion rates among your site visitors.

Keep Your Design Simple and Straightforward

A cleanly designed website has more chance of capturing the visitors attention and will want to make them visit your site further. This is why the layout of your site is important. One of the best ways to go around building a clean looking website is to have a menu bar on top which will show different categories and then link to different pages on your website. Avoid having the user scroll too much when they visit your home page. It shouldn’t look like a long sales copy for an eBook, where the user will be constantly scrolling down for several minutes just to see the rest of the content. Try to present as much information as possible to the user without them needing to scroll down further.

Include Calls to Action

While some may believe that calls to action are only useful or necessary on pages that are actively selling a product, they can be used with great success on home pages as well. If there’s a certain product or service that you’re offering which you want to draw attention to, put it up on your home page as a featured item. Then include a call to action, such as “Check out our Winter Collection”, or “Click Here for a Free Quote Now!”. A user is more likely to stay on your website if you include a message on it that asks them to proceed further, rather than letting the user figure it out on their own.

Make Sure Your Site Is Up To Date

Remove any expired promotions, or links to items that you no longer carry. While this should be quite obvious, there are many cases where this doesn’t get done, even on the websites of big and successful companies. Be sure that all the information that you present on your home page is current and relevant. You don’t want the visitor to click on something and then end up greeted by a page showing an error message due to a page that was removed or a product that doesn’t exist anymore. Also, people like to see a website that has been updated recently, so maintaining a small news feed area with recent announcements about your products or your business is also an excellent idea to keep your site visitors interested in what you have to say.

We have all seen mentions about how video marketing could be useful in terms of making money online. But the issue with it is that few business owners use it, and many of them don’t really do it well. Can you use video sharing sites like YouTube and Daily Motion to attract some customers to your website? Definitely. Here are some tips that you will find helpful for this:

• Use public video sharing sites and not your own server

The obvious advantage of this is that you will be saving bandwidth, as the videos will be hosted on a site such as YouTube and not your own server. Another advantage of this is that more people will be able to see your videos if they search for their related keywords. If you host your videos on your own server, they can only be seen on the places where you put them, such as websites, blogs or social media pages.

• Put your website and business logo at the beginning and end of your video

Even though YouTube allows you to put links in the description (which you should do as well), you are better off putting your website in your video as well. This is because some people may see your video and choose to embed it on their own website or blog, or share it with social media. If your video goes viral and is seen by a lot of people, chances are it will be embedded on a lot of sites, so to get the most traffic from this effect, your website must be present in the video itself.

• Give useful content to your viewers

It is said time and time again, nobody comes online to watch commercials, there are enough of them on TV. The content of your videos therefore needs to be relevant to your products and niche, without looking like you are only promoting your website or goods. Instructional or informational videos are the best. For example, if your company sells replacement iPhone screens, then having a video which demonstrates how to open up the iPhone and change its screen without messing up the phone would be quite useful. It can also be used for intangible products such as guides and learning materials. So if you sell language courses, you can create a video which teaches some important phrases, pronunciation, words, in another language, then at the end refer the viewers to your website so they can check out the product and see if it is good for them.

• Don’t give up if you don’t get many views

It is a fact that most videos will not achieve millions of views, especially if your niche is very specific. The issue is quality and not quantity. You can make sales with just a handful of viewers that are truly interested in the content of your video and the product behind it, while uploading a video that gets thousands of views because it is “cute” or “funny” may not bring you any serious site visitors.

We all know that running affiliate or CPA offers is a great way to bring in big money online. If you have been at it for a while, you have probably developed some useful internet marketing skills. If you want to make some fast cash, you can use these skills to your advantage by doing another type of marketing work: helping local businesses make their presence known online.

Note that this method is not something new or earth shaking. It has been discussed in many threads all over internet marketing forums. It has also been the topic of several informational products, some which sell for several hundred dollars. But you don’t really need these “super” products to do this. Some basic skills and resourcefulness are all that you would need.

To get started you will need the following:

Your own website and domain name – You don’t have to make it into a beautiful site filled with multimedia content (unless you can actually do this in a short amount of time). Just a regular site based on a free “business” template that is provided by many hosts will do.

A dedicated phone number. A toll free number would be great and can be obtained for less than $15 a month. Yes, you really need a phone number for your business. This will make it appear a lot more “professional” in the eyes of your clients and you will also appear more trustworthy in their eyes. If you are low on funds at the moment then there are plenty of free services online which give you a virtual phone number that you can use for an internet phone application and it also comes complete with voicemail.

Basic web design skills. You don’t need to be an expert. However, you should be able to create a basic website on your own. This is actually quite easy today, due to the fact that there are thousands of templates and web builder programs available online for free or at a low cost. You will just need to know how to use them efficiently.

Decent web marketing and promotion skills. Again, no need to be an expert. However, you will need to know how to do basic SEO, PPC (pay per click ads), social media marketing and using business directories and classified ads. If there is an area of marketing that you are not too familiar with, then simply read some materials online in order to learn more about it. There’s plenty of free stuff available online if you look in the right places.

Now, what will we be doing with this? Basically, you are going to be running your own web marketing agency, providing your clients with a complete set of solutions to use the internet in order to get new customers and increase their profits. While this is an actual BUSINESS that you will be running (and not just slapping up a few ads and calling it a day), you can make it as small or as big as you like. Check back tomorrow for more information on how to get clients and what to offer them.

Do you own a physical business and want to take advantage of the power of the internet to sell your products? Or do you want to start a completely new online business that will ship products to consumers? In either case, this can be a very profitable move for you. However, you will just need to do a bit of planning beforehand to make sure that everything goes well for you.

One of the main decisions that you will need to make when setting up such an enterprise is choosing whether you will sell your products on your own website or through an existing marketplace such as eBay or Amazon. Both have their unique advantages and drawbacks which you need to consider.

Selling via an online marketplace.

The advantages:

• Very high amount of traffic and basically free advertising. Those on the site are already in buying mode and all they have to do is to search for a product that you are selling. This means that you will save money on advertising.
• Easy and quick to get started. There is no need to set up a website or an ecommerce solution, all you have to do is list your items.
• Depending on the terms of the site used, offers some protection in case of fraud or disputes between you and the buyer.

The drawbacks:

• On most sites you would need to either pay a fee to get your item listed, a fee based on the final sale price of the item or both. While these fees are relatively small, they do add up if you sell many items and will also cut in your profit margin.
• Online marketplaces may have restrictions on the types of items that you can sell, where you can ship to, or the payment methods that you can accept from clients.

Selling via your own website.

The advantages:

• You can fully customize the look and feel of your site in order to better suit your business.
• You decide on your own business policies, such as the types of payments that you accept, the shopping cart software you use, etc.
• No fees to list items for sale and no fees to pay on the final sale price.

The drawbacks:

• Building an ecommerce site takes some time and effort. If you don’t want to do it yourself, you may need to hire someone else to do it, which will add to the costs of getting started. You will also need to register a domain name and find a suitable webhost.
• You will need to find a suitable solution for payment processing, as well as install an ecommerce suite on your site.
• Buyers will not just magically appear at your site. You will need to advertise your website using various methods to get traffic. This takes some time and many advertising methods, both online and offline, will also cost you money to implement and get results.

Why don’t you start the new year with a new business venture with an affiliate based website. Make Money with your own website on auto pilot and give up your boring 9-5 job and be your own boss

Join up to our membership programme and create as many websites as you like

The famous “BANS” (buildanichestore.com) is up for sale on flippa.com as the owners have decided to move onto new challenges after several years developing their product which allows users to build a website that is affiliated with the Ebay affiliate program.  Similar to our website builder programme that uses the Amazon associates affiliate network.

In their hey day they were turning over $30,000 a month in subscribers joining upto their site to use their product.  But after several months they got bad feedback from some users, but this was mainly due to the fact that the users weren’t probably setting up their sites very well which caused their sites to get penilised in Google causing a tidle wave effect.  The owners saw this as a problem and completly changed their sales pitch on their home page so they could rebuild their reputation and grow as a well established brand which i think they have done today with the invention on their new partner website N1Way.com

Build a niche store currently has 10,000 members since their launch back in 2006 where they first started out selling a custom ebay script on Digitalpoint.com to webmasters.  This is where they found their niche and built on the product and created their own website and started selling their product on clickbank.com

They are currently looking for $500,000 for their business and looking for a team of developers to take over the business and grow it into a very large network of affiliate marketing related websites

Their website currently gets 1,000 unique visitors a day with on average 4 visitors signing up to buy their product the BANS website.  The product is $97 via clickbank and 50% commission goes to their affiliates promoting their product which is a great way to market their business for free and drive alot of traffic to their website.  Their user forum has over 100,000 forum posts with 20,000 threads.  They also have 1,400,000 referrences in Google pointing to their website with a Google page rank 5

I wish these guys good luck with their future projects and hope the sale goes well.  I only wish i had the cash to buy their business as it would go great with my Websites For Sale World Website Builder program.

Alot of us are now thinking about a 2nd income with the economic crisis we need to start thinking about our future and how we can have another stream of income to live a comfortable life.

I have put together a list of ways you can make money on the internet from the comfort of your home with little upfront capital

1) Running one of our finance affiliate websites whereby you earn commission everytime someone takes out a loan via your website
2) Running one of our holiday affiliate websites whereby you earn commission everytime someone books a holiday via your website
3) Running one of our electronics affiliate websites whereby you earn commission everytime someone buys a product (e.g ipod, tv) via your website
4) Running one of our online betting affiliate websites whereby you earn commission everytime someone makes a bet on your website
5) Running one of our dropship affiliate websites whereby you earn money from selling your own products via your own website

For a full list online Opportunities take a look at our website www.establishedwebsiteforsale.co.uk

The race to christmas begins and customers will soon be thinking about buying presents for christmas and booking holidays which makes it an ideal time to run your own gifts website or holiday website
Join our network and you can take advantage of christmas and enjoy sales through your own website selling electronics, gifts, toys, holidays and much more